The Citizen needs your help for our remembrance project

This Remembrance Day, the Citizen will again ask readers for help in honouring one of Canada’s war dead.

The name of a soldier will be randomly issued on Saturday at 11:11 a.m. in an online memorial created by the Citizen, called We Are The Dead.

The name will be published on a Twitter account, @WeAreTheDead, that for six years has issued names from the list of 119,531 uniformed Canadians who have lost their lives in service to this country. A new name is published at random from the list at 11 minutes past every hour.

The account will continue to issue a new name in this fashion until 2025.

For each of the past six years, the Citizen has assembled a biography of the Canadian Forces member whose name is published on Remembrance Day at 11:11 a.m.

As in past years, the newspaper will need your help Saturday to produce that story.

Crowdsourcing material is essential since the vast majority of Canada’s war dead were killed in the First and Second World Wars, the latter of which ended more than 70 years ago. The named person can be from any branch of the service and hail from anywhere in Canada.

Sometimes, biographical material is difficult to find.

In the first year of the project, for instance, Leading Aircraftman Chancy Melvin Simpson was the subject of our story. The 24-yearold New Brunswicker left a hardto-find footprint after dying from stomach cancer in a Nova Scotia hospital in 1944. The project has more fully portrayed John Cawley, an Irish immigrant and Saskatchewan farmer who died at Vimy Ridge; Joseph Aldéric Boucher, the son of a Quebec cheesemaker who perished at the Somme; Manitoba’s Pte. Henry Rohloff, who died in the late stages of the Second World War when he stepped on a live electrical cable; and Pte. Edwin Booth, a British immigrant and farmer who died in the Battle of Mount Sorrel in June 1916.

Last year, a rich portrait emerged of Flight Sgt. Stanley Spallin, a 20-year-old pilot from Edmonton who died in a crash while patrolling the English coast in November 1942. He left behind a daughter who was unborn at the time of his death, Yvonne Holden, whom the Citizen found in Mount Lehman, B.C.

This year, we will again crowdsource the research, and we invite genealogists, historians, military buffs and all readers to help us develop the profile, which will be published online late Saturday.

If you’d like to help, please follow @WeAreTheDead and watch for the name tweeted at 11:11 a.m.

You can email any biographical details to reporters Andrew Duffy at aduffy@postmedia.com and Shaamini Yogaretnam at syogaretnam@postmedia.com, or city editor Drake Fenton at dfenton@ postmedia.com.

You can also tweet information directly to @citizenduffy, @shaaminiwhy or @drakefenton. We’ll be using the hashtag #wearethedead.